Members will recall Marc Hendricks from Save Our Summits was our guest speaker at our meeting at the Braidwood Services Club.
Pictured- at Braidwood, Hugh Hodkinson, Marc Hendricks, Garry Gowen, Joan Webb and Terry Hart
Mark told us the sad story of Mt Warning (renamed Wollunbin) being closed to everyone except Aboriginal people by the NSW Department of Planning and Environment’s National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) after it declared the mountain to be ‘a place of sacred ceremonies linked to traditional law and custom,’ particular to the Bundjalung nation.
Well, there is some good news, the Government has done a back flip and announced it was a temporary closure and will re-open for visitors. Marc says, “Seems good news, but the timeframe is still beyond the next election”.
See below information provided by Marc:
Access to the summit of Mt Warning via the 120 year old community built summit track was closed on a "temporary" basis at the start of the Covid pandemic in March 2020. While every other National Park in NSW was soon reopened, Mt Warning was subject to a series of rolling temporary closures due to safety and indigenous cultural issues. A number of organisations formed to challenge the closure including Save Our Summits. The five-year+ campaign to have the mountain reopened met with some success this week as the NSW Environment Minister announced the "temporary" closure would be extended to June 2027, but indicated this was to allow for visitors to be welcomed back to the summit in a “culturally appropriate” way. The announcement was welcomed by various groups including Ngarakwal custodian Sturt Boyd whose late Grandmother Millie Boyd was the last recognised knowledge holder of the mountain, and was interviewed extensively by NPWS anthropologists in the 1980s.
No detail of what this would mean for visitor access was included in the announcement.
SOS are cautiously optimistic of the announcement but question the lack of detail and amount of time required for re-opening given the mountain will have been closed for 6 years in March 2026. What has the department been doing over the last 5 years?
SOS has offered the Minister assistance with the reopening and also propose increased use of volunteers to assist with track maintenance in the future. We are yet to receive a reply from the Minister on these points.
AFA know full well the hard-fought battles for access for all to our public Lands. Peter Smith
